


Base 12

by Nemhaine42



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Darcyland Secret Santa 2016, Dubious Science, Established Relationship, F/M, Gen, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 13:05:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8891887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemhaine42/pseuds/Nemhaine42
Summary: Darcy accidentally goes back to 1944 but takes some convincing about it.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ChrissiHR](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChrissiHR/gifts).



**_Germany, December 1944._ **

 

The rusted metal door swung open, bouncing off the concrete wall with a clang. Dust swirled around as fresh air got into the building, possibly for the first time in years. 

 

This was Base 12. Not the twelfth Hydra site they had infiltrated or overtaken, more like the twentieth. Its name, as it was called by Hydra, was Base 12. And it was different than any other Hydra base. 

 

For starters, every other base the Howling Commandos had burst into had been inhabited. Mostly by soldiers, and plain clothes operatives, the odd SS officer, and a few technicians. Base 12 was devoid of people. Nobody had come near this building in some time; the woods around it were thick with untouched snow, the path overgrown, the building’s facade neglected and with enormous icicles hanging from the gutter. What it had even been used for was not clear,  and didn’t become any more so as Bucky and the others crept inside, weapons aloft. The interior - an entry room, and a hallway with smaller rooms sprouting off it - had been tipped upside down. Every possible kind of detritus was lying here and there as if a twister had gone through the base. What was also strange about Base 12 was that none of the things strewn about it looked military, or even office-like. Where they had expected to find weapons stations, communications, maps or even a few typewriters, there were garden rakes, sideboards, newspapers, and shoes, none of which matched. 

 

It all crunched underfoot as they spread out across the room, silent as night. No people running for cover or firing at them, no alarms, no nothing. 

 

There came a sudden sound in the window and they all spun to aim at it, but it was nothing more than a crow.

 

Dugan sighed, “doesn’t look too promising.”

 

“Yeah, this one’s a bust,” Morita complained. “Nothing happening here.”

 

“Maybe that’s what they want us to think,” said Gabe. 

 

“You know something?” Steve started, squinting curiously around the base. “This building’s gotta be, what, early 30s?”

 

“Looks like it,” agreed Bucky. 

 

“And yet everything in it… isn’t.”

 

Steve had a point. None of the abandoned and beaten up furniture was modern, all of it at least a decade old, some of it antique. Very, very antique. Dugan picked up off the floor a document that either was or looked like a German newspaper dated 1776. But rather than some dusty, fragile old paper, it looked like it could have been printed yesterday. 

 

“This place startin’ to feel weird to anyone, or is it just me?” Dum Dum asked. 

 

A murmur of assent came from the group and they slowed their pace down, until they were gently toeing at each piece of trash like it would spring up and explode. Gabe and Dernier starting kicking more roughly at a pile of parts, wondering aloud what it was. It clearly belonged to some machine or other that might have been a really swanky vacuum cleaner. If vacuum cleaners came in purple and yellow, and didn’t have bags. 

 

“Hey, look at this” called Falsworth, who was shining his flashlight at a pile of paper in a corner. It was a calendar, torn and dirty, that read ‘December, 1968,’ covered in Russian annotations. “I’ve heard of forward planning but…”

 

The crow in the window cawed again. 

 

“Let’s keep moving,” Steve ordered. 

 

They covered one another as they went down the hallway, peeling off to search the smaller office-like rooms as they went. They were filled with much the same measure of crap, like various attics throughout history had been tipped into each room. A piano lay splintered and broken on its side. Small machines, little more than boxes, with cables pouring out of the back leading to nothing. A ratty old dressmaker’s dummy, a greatcoat from the Great War, one individual women’s shoe with a heel so high and thin it looked impossible to walk in. 

 

Bucky got the last room, poking his head around the doorframe as the others were beginning to shout the all clear from elsewhere. This room was not so full as the others, so he could see that it lacked any carpet or wood flooring. It was just a bare concrete room, with a dripping pipe on the wall opposite the door. It felt freezing, much colder than outside, but Bucky could not see his breath. As he crept inside he saw the distinct shape of a woman, prone and unconscious on the floor. 

 

“Hey! In here!” Bucky shouted to the others. He waiting the few seconds it took Steve to get behind him, then darted forward to check the girl for injuries. There was a well formed bruise on her forehead, but nothing else obvious. No blood, no clear breaks. She was breathing and had a strong pulse but she was chilled, like she’d been lying there for a while. He gently shook her shoulder, but she didn’t wake. 

 

“Buck?” Steve called.

 

“She’s alive, looks like she hit her head but…” Bucky looked around for any way to tell how she even got inside the base. No-one had been through the front door for a long time, and this room had only a small window that maybe a kid could have climbed through but not a grown woman. 

 

“... how’d she get in here?” he wondered. 

 

He looked back down at her; she was a pretty little thing, with dark hair and rosy lips. But she was dressed kooky as hell; obscenely tight blue jeans, fancy glasses, and boots that looked more like they belonged to a man. Bucky noticed that clutched in her hand was a rectangular box, like a machine gun magazine but smaller and made of engraved gold. She had a small leather bag strapped across her chest, and scattered around her was yet more of the junk that filled the rest of the base, but newer, that didn’t look like it had been lying in a Hydra base for years: a brightly coloured paper cup, with spilled coffee. Part of a crumpled up newspaper dated a few days ago - in the year 2016. If this was some kind of trap, it was a really well planned one. 

 

Bucky didn’t look away from the girl, though he faintly registered Dugan saying the rest of the place was nothing but junk. Steve decided to call it quits and move back to base camp. Without being told, or even hinted at, Bucky hooked his rifle over his shoulder by the strap and slid his hands beneath the young woman, hoisting her smoothly up into his arms. He wasn’t sure if she weighed very little, or if he had gotten stronger. 

 

“You manage?” Steve checked.

 

“Yeah, I got her,” Bucky replied, following Steve and letting Dugan take rear guard. 

 

They bundled the girl in a spare coat, then took her into their jeep. Steve and Falsworth would ride back on the bikes, the other men in the jeep; Bucky, Dernier and Morita sat in the back, with the girl laid across them. They drove hastily across bumpy terrain covered in slushy snow, and several times Bucky had to remind Dugan of their injured passenger. They’d get back to camp well before dark, but Bucky wasn’t sure what they were going to do if this girl needed a hospital. Field medic training was one thing, but each of the Howling Commandos walked into every mission knowing they were mostly on their own, taking their lives into their own hands. This woman didn’t. And they were a good ways from the front lines. He just had to hope she’d wake up soon. 

 

Bucky thought to himself what a crying shame it was; how he would have loved many a time to be in the back seat of a car with a pretty lady in his arms, but when he actually got there, she was unconscious and in a warzone. This gal wasn’t dressed for the military, so where did she come from? Where was her family? She wore a chain around her neck, from which hung a silver ring with a star in blue stone. Somebody, somewhere would want their lady back, safe and sound. 

 

They went over a particularly deep pothole in the road, jostling everyone uncomfortably. A loud collective groan went through the car, and Bucky felt the girl he was cradling stir. She let out an unhappy whine and he looked down to see the her eyes fluttering open, pained and unfocused. 

 

“Hey, there, Sleeping Beauty,” he said. 

 

Her gaze landed on him and she smiled up at him like he was Cary Grant or something, a beautiful smile stretching across her tired face, “hey, yourself.”

 

“How you feeling?”

 

“Like crap.” 

 

“You gonna be sick? ‘Cause now’s not good.”

 

“No, my head hurts. M’dizzy.”

 

She frowned as she took in his appearance, then reached up to lovingly run her fingers over the soft hair at the back of his neck, “when did you have time to cut your hair?” she asked in a sleepy voice. 

 

The guys smothered their giggles, watching Bucky get caressed by this strange woman. 

 

“Not that that ain’t nice, sweetheart, but something tells me you’re spoken for,” Bucky said, ignoring her question and pulling her hand away from his neck, then setting it down on her chest over the ring. Poor gal was obviously confused, mixed up from hitting her head. She was starting to realise that too, looking up and around the back seat of the jeep, just noticing where she was. 

 

“What happened?”

 

Morita answered, “you got a bump on the head. We’re taking you someplace safe to rest up, okay?”

 

“Okay.” She looked back up at Bucky and said, “this is a really weird dream,” then turned her head towards his chest and went back to sleep. 

 

Once it became clear that she was out for the count, Gabe looked round into the back seat, “anyone else think it’s weird that when we find a girl in a Hydra base in Germany, she’s American?”

 

“You think she could be a plant?” asked Jim. 

 

“Maybe.”

 

“Whaddya think, Sarge? You know this kid?” Dum Dum asked from the driver’s seat, twisting back for a look at her. “She seemed to know you,” he added with a dry smile 

 

“She hit her head, maybe I look like somebody?” 

 

“Pfft,” Morita puffed. “Don’t know if I can believe that -  _ you _ looking like a somebody?”

 

“Shuddup,” Bucky retorted and smacked Morita’s arm. 

  
  


*******

  
  


Darcy woke up feeling like she’d gone ten rounds with Thor in a bad mood. She was uncomfortable, cold and stiff, and her head was splitting. She’d had a confusing dream about gliding through the forest with Bucky, all dressed up like his Howling Commando self. Which was odd because her Bucky actively tried to avoid that sort of thing; he said it was too much pressure to be someone he didn’t much remember. And Darcy never minded, she liked his long hair and scruffy beard, so to be dreaming about him that way was unusual. 

 

She stretched out on whatever spartan cot bed this was, feeling pulls and pains in her muscles that hadn’t been there before. The dizziness was gone but she was still a little fuzzy on what happened. She remembered Jane’s conference at the university in Göttingen. She remembered being dragged out into the middle of the woods, looking for some anomaly in a dilapidated old bunker. She recalled zoning out as Thor and Jane conversed eagerly in their Asgardian-Science language, and fiddling with the fancy collaborative gizmos they’d brought. Midgardian scientific equipment made to Asgardian specifications. The next thing she knew she was dreaming about Bucky with his 40s hair, then waking up in a tent that smelled of socks. 

 

She groaned as she sat up, and found herself wrapped in an enormous khaki overcoat. Very military, just like the cot bed, and the entire tent really. To the left of her bed, sitting on an upturned crate was Bucky, still in the iconic blue jacket of his Commandos get-up, still with the short hair, in the middle of rolling a cigarette. The cigarette was weird, she’d never seen Bucky smoke, but the rifle propped up against his leg was perfectly normal. 

 

He stared at her and she stared at him. 

 

“Hello?” he said uncertainly. 

 

If this was some kind of prank, she was going to kick the ass of whoever was responsible into next week. It wasn’t even funny, trying to make her think this was the Second World War. And, god, the pain in her head, why was this even remotely allowed? Her eyes kept darting around the tent, trying to spot someone hiding and watching to see if she’d fall for it. But everything was frighteningly seamless. She heard a dull clink and turned to see Bucky pouring water from his canteen into a tin mug.  She took it when he offered it, sipping gently.

 

“Now’s a way better time for you to throw up, by the way,” Bucky informed her. “Just in case.” 

 

She looked at him quizzically for a brief moment, thinking back to her dream. 

 

“Where are we?” she asked groggily. 

 

“About twelve miles south-east of Bielefeld, Germany,” Bucky answered. He was watching her like she was a most curious thing.

 

“Geez, I didn’t get very far,” she grumbled. “Where’s Jane? I wanna tell her her transport theory sucks.”

 

Bucky looked confused and frowned at her, “who’s Jane?”

 

Okay, that was taking this whole thing just a little too far. Darcy felt like crap and didn’t really want to deal with these shenanigans any longer. When she looked over to tell Bucky exactly what she thought of his idea of a game, the words dropped dead at the end of her mouth. Her heart skipped a beat. He used his left thumb to scritch at his eyebrow. A hand made of flesh and bone, with drying cuts, and dirt under the fingernails. 

 

She looked around the tent again, starting to doubt her prank hypotheses and trying to find an alternative explanation lying under one of the other cots. But there was none. But that meant that she came closer to believing she’d actually travelled back more than seventy years, with no real idea how she’d accomplished that. If only she’d paid more attention when Jane was explaining the gadgets. She faintly heard Bucky ask if she was okay, but she honestly didn’t know the answer. 

 

That base had been weird, even weirder than Darcy was used to. It had felt creepy in general, and had made Bucky -  _ her  _ Bucky - tense and agitated. He’d groped through the murky waters of his mind, struggling with a memory of the place or someplace that looked the same. Darcy subtly eyed the Bucky sitting across from her, wondering if this was why. Had Bucky retained, through time and torture, a memory of Darcy in this strange place before he ever knew her?

 

Then she had a most horrific thought - if she was where, or rather when, she thought she was, there would be an easy way to check. 

 

_ ‘Zhelaniye.’ _

 

She thought the word but could not say it. Darcy did not think she could bring herself to even whisper it. If this really was nineteen-forty-whatever then he wouldn’t bat an eyelid, wouldn’t even know what she was talking about. But if this was a trick, an awful nasty trick, then he would… 

 

“Do you have my bag?” she asked instead. 

 

He nodded and got up off his perch, moving to leave the tent. Just as he reached the entrance, he turned back to her, looking up and down and fixing her with a suspicious glare, “stay here.”

 

She had zero problem with this and sat patiently on the cot bed, waiting for her headache to kill her or for Bucky’s return. But it wasn’t so simple a task as leave the tent, fetch her purse, and come back. Apparently it involved a lot of strung-out and bickery negotiations with the people outside. Darcy could only make out muffled arguing, unable to hear exactly what was being said. She could hardly see what the problem was, there should be very little of interest in her purse; unless that was where Jane and Thor’s little wormhole accelerant thingy had wound up. 

 

She got up with a creak and a groan and poked her head out of the tent. She saw Bucky and Steve and the other Howling Commandos - men who were supposed to be dead - standing in a circle and giving her purse an autopsy. The pain in her head flared. She felt a burst of annoyance in her chest, time travel or not it was rude to go through a lady’s things without asking, and she stomped across the muddy campsite to where the group of men were chattering away. As she got closer, she heard snippets of their conversation that had been indistinct before. 

 

“... somebody called Jane and a ‘transport theory,’ which I think she was calling crummy but, uh, maybe it was getting lost in translation.”

 

“I thought she was American?” asked Steve. Gabe coughed, having seen Darcy approaching, and started smacking Steve in the side. 

 

Bucky didn’t notice and kept talking, about the fact that if she was putting her accent on, she was damn good at it. And Morita agreed, holding up her driver’s license and called it ‘a real sharp fake ID.’ 

 

“It is  _ not _ fake!” Darcy barked at them. The whole group spun to look at her, with Morita at least having the decency to look sheepish for going through her stuff. 

 

“Hey, c’mon, doll, I told you to stay in the tent. Why don’t we jus-” Bucky started. 

 

“And I’m telling you to cram it!” Darcy interrupted. She stood close to Bucky out of habit more than anything else, but it made her retort that much more effective. He reeled back from her, which brought a snort of laughter out of Dugan.

 

“What’s your name, kid?” Dugan asked.

 

“Darcy,” she answered, glad it was Dum Dum asking and not Steve or Bucky. It made it easier to pretend like that was a normal question, rather than telling her name to two people who should already know it. 

 

“Well, Darcy, you got a lotta funky stuff in this bag. Wanna tell us what any of it is?” 

 

“Yeah, what about this one?” asked Morita, having swapped her ID for her iPod, now repeated pressing the central button and lighting up the screen. 

 

“Don’t do that! You’ll wear the batter down,” she snapped, grousing to herself that her charger was seventy years away. It didn’t assuage any of them and each man asked her a different question: where was she from, where were her family, what was she doing in Base 12? It made her head go round in circles, answering to the left then the right, like being interrogated by a whack-a-mole machine. 

 

“How did you get in that bunker?” Steve asked. 

 

Darcy sighed, shoulders sagging, “it’s gonna sound crazy.”

 

The guys all shrugged and looked at one another - specifically Steve. Between a machine that transforms little guys into big ones, and Hydra weapons, and men with red skully faces, they’d seen their fair share of crazy. They all looked at Darcy expectantly. 

 

“I travelled back in time,” she announced. “From the year 2016. To be honest, I’m not sure I believe it myself.”

 

There was an awkward silence, with Darcy waiting for one of them to tell her that, yeah, that sounds impossible. But Steve just looked down at her, measured and calculating; it was a look she was used to seeing but not on the receiving end. She decided that was the clincher - Steve was not the best liar. 

 

“Can you prove that?” he asked. 

 

“Probably not,” Darcy admitted. “Not unless you want to know how long it’ll take the Cubs to win the World Series.” 

 

“I believe her,” grumbled Dugan. 

 

Steve glared at him but gave a grumbling sigh and nodded to Morita, who handed her bag back. She tried not to snatch it from him, and immediately looked through to make sure everything was there; phone, wallet, iPod. But one very important thing was very obviously missing, and if it was lost, she was in big trouble. 

 

“It’s not here,” she whispered in disbelief. She double and triple checked each pocket, even the ones that were far too small to contain what she was looking for. “Where is it?” 

 

“Where’s what?” Steve asked. 

 

Darcy began tugging at her clothes frantically, feeling the pockets, and becoming quite anxious. “Oh, god, I can’t even remember what it’s called. The thing, the stupid gold thingy. It.. it had a lot of vowels in it’s name, I’m not good with that sort of thing. I wasn’t supposed to be touching it and, god, please tell me you have it. It’s what brought me here, I need it to get home. Somehow.”

 

“You mean this thing?” Bucky asked. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the golden magazine he’d found in Darcy’s hand. She spun to look and was delighted to see the device, rushing towards him to grab it. He held it out of her reach and put up his other hand to stop her. 

 

“Woah, sweetheart, you gotta give us a little more than that. What do you mean it brought you here?”

 

“I mean it brought me here. It’s the thing, it’s the time travel whatchamacallit.”

 

“Oh,” Bucky started taking more interest in the object itself, finding buttons and dials carefully camouflaged in amongst the engravings. “So, if I push one of these, it’ll send me back to… your time, or further back?”

 

Darcy shrugged helplessly, she was just an astrophysicist’s assistant, “I don’t know. I don’t… I don’t think it’ll do anything here. We’re too far away. Jane, Jane said,” she took a few deep breaths to think clearly, rubbing at her throbbing temple. “She was trying to access m-, uh, multi-dimensional gravitation via a wormhole hotspot in order to travel through _ space _ . Much to my distress, it does not actually work like that.”

 

“Worm… hole?” repeated Dugan. All the guys were staring at her. 

 

“Where’s Stark when you need him?” muttered Steve. 

 

Bucky looked at Darcy pensively, “you mean a tunnel? In space?”

 

“Y-yeah…” Darcy confirmed, a tone of surprise in her voice. “I mean, that was the idea. Apparently it’s a tunnel in time instead.”

 

“And the Base 12 is the tunnel?”

 

Darcy shrugged, “I guess. In my time there’s a big perimeter fence, we figured that was the limit and that the authorities boarded it up when they couldn’t figure it out. We had a whole bunch of old files about weird shit happening there, stuff disappearing and coming back as something else.”

 

“Like furniture?” Bucky asked.

 

“Or vacuum cleaners?” asked Gabe. 

 

“Or calendars from 1968?” asked Falsworth, raising an eyebrow.

 

Darcy frowned, “no. Like, stuff from this time, or close to it. Telephones, old cans of paint… office crap.”

 

Bucky puzzled over that information, a frown pinching at his brows, “the tunnel’s always there? Stuff goes through it from our time to other times, just on its own? How come you needed this thing?”

 

“It’s supposed to ‘focus’ it somehow. So that you can send specific things,” she pointed to herself, “rather than just whatever’s lying around. I think.”

 

Bucky hummed a little, considering what Darcy had told him, then with something of a weary sigh gazed down at her skeptically and said, “what you’re saying is that for you to get home, we’ve gotta take you back to the creepy bunker? You know how suspicious that sounds, right?”

 

She supposed she did, but she just made a helpless ‘I don’t know’ gesture and pouted. She turned to the other and tried her best puppy dog expression, pleading with all of them to take her to Base 12. Some were more easily won over with some strategic batting of eyelashes but, typically, Steve and Bucky were hard to convince 

 

“You’ve gotta take me back there, please?” she begged. “I need to get home.”

 

Darcy’s lip wobbled, not altogether voluntarily, at the thought that she’d have to stay here and not be able to get back to the future or ever see Jane or Thor or  _ her _ Bucky again. Wasn’t home a place that every soldier wanted to go?

 

“Alright,” Steve relented. “Bucky, you keep hold of that device until we get there.”

 

He gave out more orders - to ready the vehicles to take them back, to radio HQ and inform them of the change of plans - until everyone had something to do and the camp was busy. As Bucky lead her away to get something hot to drink, Darcy heard Falsworth approaching Steve and conspiring.

 

“Do you think she’s telling the truth?” Falsworth muttered. 

 

Steve shrugged, and Darcy could feel his eyes on the back of her head, “even if she’s not, there’s something going on in that base and we oughta find out what.”

  
  


*******

  
  


If anything, Base 12 was in worse repair when they returned. It was past sunset and the wind was picking up, making the place even more eerie than before. The icicles that had clung to the guttering had all fallen or been knocked down, now lying sticking up out of the snow. One of the side windows was cracked. 

 

Bucky and the others approached the base with the same caution as they had done that morning but Darcy strode ahead, marching in through the door and straight to the little room she’d been found in. They called for her to hang back and wait for them to clear the building but she paid them no heed. Bucky chased after her, and the others followed suit, but they found her unharmed and harmless, just standing in the doorway looking about the room.

 

Where it had been sparse compared to the rest of the building before, now it was as full as the others of useless junk. Cardboard boxes, foil packets of Pop Tarts, graph paper galore, and a large hooded sweatshirt from Culver University. Darcy walked forward and picked the garment up off the floor; it rustled in her hand and she pulled a piece of notepaper out of its pocket. A smile blossomed across her face at whatever it said and turned back to face the guys. They were all still cautious, with their weapons held ready but not pointed at Darcy, just in case. 

 

“What’s that?” Bucky asked, nodding at the paper in her hand. 

 

“It means they’re looking for me,” she said happily. 

 

Bucky wasn’t entirely sure who ‘they’ were, or how they were looking for Darcy when she was seventy years behind them. 

 

“Hey, gimme the thing,” she called to Bucky, waggling her fingers at him. 

 

He looked around the room, and its twenty-first century detritus, then pulled the device from his pants pocket. “Should we get out of here, or…?”

 

“Well, you- I mean Jane was in the room with me when I left so… just stand well back, I guess.” she said, holding out her hand for the gadget. 

 

Bucky looked at the object in his hand and back to Darcy. This was probably stupidly dangerous; it could all be an elaborate trick, she could be an agent of Hydra just waiting for him to hand over this remote control and she could blow the whole damn place to bits. But there was something about Base 12 that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. The place was weird and not in the way Hydra usually operated. 

 

He took two large steps forward and stretched his hand out to give Darcy her time traveling gizmo, whipping himself back the two steps as soon as she had a hold of it. She fiddled with its settings and held her thumb over one of the buttons, double-checked the note, then took a measured, uneasy breath. 

 

“Wish me luck, fellas,” she said, then depressed the button which gave a satisfying click. 

 

A wave of static flowed from the device, enveloping Darcy though she let out no scream. It built into arcs of lightning which danced around in front of her but never quite reached as far as Bucky. Inside the circle of electricity, he saw, as if through a rainbow or a soap bubble, three figures. A woman, short and with an armful of equipment, and two men: one was a tank of a man, tall and blonde. The other was - himself? As soon as he even had that thought, the centre of the event became too bright to see. Darcy vanished in a flash of light and the room felt like a very fast elevator, compressing the air and sucking it towards the spot where she used to be. Dugan had to hold on to his hat to avoid losing it to whatever this was. 

 

When the light faded, the room’s contents had been stirred up, paper floating gently to the ground. In Darcy’s place there lay a box of mechanic’s tools covered in oil and dirt.

 

“What the hell was that?” Steve said. “Is she…?”

 

“She just, that  _ worked _ ?” exclaimed Gabe. Dernier let out a stream of disbelieving French. 

 

“I dunno, but Phillips and Carter aren’t going to believe a word of any of this,” Morita griped. 

 

Bucky stared at the space Darcy had left behind, trying to make sense of what he’d seen. Was it merely his reflection in whatever the hell that just was? It couldn’t possibly be  _ him _ . He’d be ancient by the time 2016 rolled around. When he finally tore his gaze away, he saw the piece of paper Darcy had read from lying at his feet. He picked it up off the floor, staring hard at the chunky red lettering.

 

_ ‘Darcy - Turn the left-hand dial to the rune that looks like a B. Then press the biggest button.’ _

 

Bucky felt Steve hovering over his shoulder and peering down at the note.

 

“Looks kinda like your handwriting,” Steve said. 

  
“Kinda,” Bucky shrugged, trying to keep the nervousness out of his voice. He folded the paper into his pocket. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Darcyland Secret Santa 2016 exchange for chrissihr. The original DLSS post is [here](http://darcylandsecretsanta.tumblr.com/post/154512527510/my-secret-santa-gift-for-chrissihr-have-an-art) and the accompanying art can be viewed solo on [my blog](http://nemhaine42.tumblr.com/post/154629562479/base-12-art-for-my-contribution-to-darcyland).


End file.
